Perpetually under construction? Not if Smitherman has his way

I don't live in Toronto anymore, I just play there on weekends. And I'm not sure whether Toronto mayoral candidate George Smitherman's plan to make contractors pay for overly delayed road construction is practical or implementable, but I'm willing to bet it will be a popular promise.

Heck, as I run the gauntlet of Guelph's construction maze, I'm wishing that there were councillors and mayoral candidates willing to propose the same thing here. I live about a 10 minute drive from the university, and have had to detour from the most direct route about 80% of the time since I moved into my current house over two years ago. The main north-south street (Brock-Gordon-Woolwich) has been under perpetual construction since I moved to Guelph over three years ago, usually with a complete blockage of at least one direction at any given point. I pity the poor businesses on the south end of Wyndham, which has been completely ripped up for the past two years. On some mornings, not only is my main route blocked, but so is at least one major alternate. And don't get me started on what happens in winter, when many of the residential alternate roads are essentially down to one lane, shared by both directions of traffic.

Of course, this probably wouldn't bother me so much if I routinely saw construction crews working on the torn up segments. But I would estimate that on about 50% of sunny days, many of the ripped up segments are vacant. It's as if at the start of the spring, a bunch of crews go around, rip up all the city streets that are supposed to be repaired in a given year, and then a single repair crew slowly makes its way around the city to fix everything. At least to the uninformed layperson's eye, it doesn't seem to be the most efficient or traffic-friendly approach.

I don't put on my "grumpy ratepayer/letter-writer to the local free paper" hat very often, but this issue does get me riled up. End of rant - please return to your regular business!

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